Five things investors learned in the last week

26th April 2013

1) Spanish unemployment hit a staggering 27.2 per cent as the BBC reported. Mindful Money’s Shaun Richards hones in on the number of households with no one in work in his Mindful Money blog and in the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard urges the country to leave the EU.

2) Snatching economic mediocrity from the jaws of triple dip disaster, the UK economy grew at about 0.3 per cent in the first quarter of the year. The economy is healing says Chancellor George Osborne though DPM Nick Clegg says ‘we’re not out of the woods yet’ as the Daily Mail reports.

3) Apple’s profits fell $2bn year on year but it announced a huge $50bn dollar buyback over the next three years. There have been acres of newsprint – and webpages – expended on Apple this week but maybe this story on Forbes is more important. Research firm Juniper says Korean arch rival Samsung has seen nearly double the sales of smart phones.

4) Three academics say they can utilise search terms from Google to construct a winning trading strategy as Mindful Money reports. In summary, sell the Dow Jones when people are searching for the term ‘debt’ and buy it back a week later. Other slightly less successful search terms are available.

5) This may be the week’s most sensible article from the Guardian in which HSBC global chief economist Stephen King says both austerians and Keynesians are wrong when they think have the answers to return developed economies to high growth. Both groups should come to terms with this.